In order to achieve high-quality and sustainable development, the petrochemical industry needs to adopt more “advancing with The Times” means and methods, use the world’s leading digital technology to continuously improve the automation degree of plants and factories, accelerate the digitization process of enterprises, and comprehensively improve the level of production efficiency, production lean management, precise carbon emission monitoring and enterprise management.

Recently, Liu Maoshu, vice president and general manager of Asia-Pacific region of Honeywell Characteristic Materials and Technology Group, and Bai Wei, president of Shenghong Petrochemical Industry Group, accepted an interview with China Chemical Information Weekly reporter on the development trend of digital intelligence in the petrochemical industry, and the problems of cooperation between the two sides in smart factories.

On June 28, Honeywell and Shenghong Petrochemical Industry Group (hereinafter referred to as “Shenghong Petrochemical”) released the “Dual Technology Integration, Operational Excellence: Honeywell –

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Shenghong Petrochemical Smart Factory Practice White Paper (hereinafter referred to as “White paper”), aiming at the transformation challenges and development opportunities faced by the process industry under the background of “dual carbon” goal, proposes data-driven strategy and operational excellence methodology, shares practical cases of both sides, helps promote the high-quality development and digital transformation of the industry, and explores the application and implementation of smart technology in the process industry. Bai Wei stressed that the current petrochemical and chemical industry in China has stood at a new starting point, the industry has entered the stock competition mode, last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other six departments issued the “14th Five-Year Plan” to promote the high-quality development of the petrochemical and chemical industry guidance “pointed out that by 2025, The petrochemical and chemical industry should basically form a high-quality development pattern with strong independent innovation ability, reasonable structure and layout, green safety and low carbon, which puts forward new requirements for the development of the petrochemical industry.

New requirements will inevitably lead to the transformation and upgrading of the industry. As a traditional industry, the transformation of the petrochemical industry should not only involve products and production process routes, but more importantly, the transformation of the production management level, which should adopt more “advancing with The Times” means and methods, such as digital and intelligent technology. Therefore, the application of digital intelligence to factory management and integrated management will bring major changes to the industry. Use digital technology to continuously improve the automation level of plants and factories, accelerate the digitization process of enterprises, in order to comprehensively improve the level of production efficiency, production lean management, precise carbon emission monitoring and enterprise management.

In this context, we need to seize the opportunity to speed up exploration and practice, but the transformation and upgrading is not achieved overnight, and we need to constantly update and iterate, and continue to improve with the development of digitalization and intelligence.

Dual skills integration and strong cooperation

New challenges, new technological advances, and new conceptual changes make the topic of building a smart factory in the petrochemical industry more complex and rich. Among them, as a key investment process in China’s petrochemical industry, propane dehydrogenation (PDH) can be described as a microcosm of the entire petrochemical industry. Liu Maoshu pointed out that the white paper released this time expounds the trend of digital transformation of the process industry represented by petrochemical, and details the benchmark case of propane dehydrogenation (PDH) smart factory jointly built with Shenghong Petrochemical from the dimensions of goals, practice paths, construction results and benefits. Honeywell demonstrated a number of mature intelligent solutions and technology applications covering all aspects of manufacturing.

Shenghong Petrochemical and Honeywell have been discussing for two years how to achieve digitalization and intelligence in Chinese petrochemical enterprises. Since 2021, Honeywell has carried out comprehensive and in-depth cooperation with Shenghong Petrochemical in smart factory and advanced control around the propane dehydrogenation unit, thus launching the intelligent transformation and planning of Shenghong Petrochemical.

Through the provision of UOP interconnection services, Advanced control system (APC), intelligent production management execution system (Honeywell MES), process alarm management, carbon emission monitoring and other digital technologies, Honeywell has helped Shenghong Petrochemical to secure the industry leading position in plant performance, production cost, and key indicators of carbon emissions. Transform the traditional operation management concept of the plant, achieve cost reduction and efficiency, excellent operation, and create a cooperation model of smart factories in the propane dehydrogenation industry. On this basis, we summarize these practices into a white paper that is more relevant to the actual operation of the enterprise, showing the entire process from hardware to software to management process improvement.